Longitudinal Stability Control Algorithm of Vehicle Platooning Based on Time-Varying Information Transmission Delays

To solve the information transmission problems, such as time delay and packet loss in the vehicle platoon longitudinal stability under complex traffic environments, a control algorithm was proposed with an age of information (AoI) for net-connected autonomous vehicle platooning. This control algorithm was arranged to adjust the influence weight on the distance of the platoon vehicles according to the AoI of the preceding multi-vehicle, to predict the distance between the following vehicle and the preceding vehicle based on time-varying delay information, to receive the real-time requests sent from the platoon vehicles to the roadside unit (RSU) at the request period, and to make the RSU respond in turn to the request vehicles based on the predict vehicle distance from small to large, so as to avoid the collision caused by time-varying delay. The numerical simulation results show that, compared with the intelligent driver model (IDM), the proposed longitudinal stability control algorithm can provide a better control effect. In the case of 20% probability of time-varying delay in vehicle-to-vehicle communication environment, the reduction ratio of platooning distance deviation is 9.96% and the reduction ratio of average peak age of information is 8.7%. And analyzing the impact of request period in platoon vehicles and the number of response request vehicles on platoon longitudinal stability, the platoon longitudinal stability presents a decreasing trend as the increase of request period values and an increasing trend as the increase of the number of response request vehicles separately. Finally, the real vehicle tests were carried out, validating the vehicle driving data and the vehicle time delay data in the queue cut-out scenario, and introducing the results into the numerical simulation experiment. The results show that the headway deviation can be reduced by 15%.